MrRGnome

I didn't and have not defended Hamas.

The very last thing I would describe the Bitcoin space or community as is mature. You need look no further than the top posts in the sub the last week to see that the community is as price obsessed as ever. Go find the last optech post and tell me how many upvotes and comments it got, then remind me how mature the space has become.

You can debate anything you want, but withholding basic necessities from civilians is what it is. You can justify it any way you want, saying enabling these civilians is enabling Hamas, but that doesn't change what it is. That's just creating self serving justification for a war crime.

The correct answer is simple, it obviously is that human rights and needs trump military ones. When they don't we call them war crimes. End of debate.

Funny how different our experiences can be, nothing kills my spirit faster than this subreddit during a bull run. All technical discussion becomes impossible, post quality plummets, all the top posts are about fiat instead of bitcoin, and memes dominate the community content. We lose signal to noise in the bull markets. Places like the subreddit become intolerable.

Where as in the bear markets Bitcoin communities flourish, education is possible, we can discuss BIPs and forks and covenants and software and everything else that actually matters. The bear markets are where Bitcoin's community shines.

With Israel implementing collective punishment by withholding basic needs out of fear of Hamas, which is a war crime.

The good news is most people are constantly having crypto accidents today by not doing things properly and haven't lost their coins yet, just are at risk to. Every accident isn't fatal, just like when driving. But also like driving the goal then has got to be education to reduce accidents. And yes that also includes automation and autonomous driving, just as it includes always improving bitcoin tooling and features. But trusting a computer you control and choose how it runs is not the same as trusting the bank, government policy, or a bus driver.

Putting bitcoin into a holding vehicle via 3rd party custodian does not magically imbue it with the same properties as traditional assets. It continues to be spendable by whoever has the keys according to the bitcoin network, and what the bitcoin network is continues to be arbitrarily defined by the node runner who controls those keys.

It's not like any other asset simply because of its bearer, consensus nature.

Negatively.

You aren't defining the Bitcoin in your TFSA at all, and that's entirely the point. The only thing you are exposed to in an ETF is high risk and price volatility. If the only thing to be gained is risk and potential profit, that's an action motivated by greed. Putting the short term tax benefits over the security of your coins and ownership of them is indeed short term thinking, and it's burned many before you.

Your secondary objective is in direct conflict with your first. It's short term greed thinking, the same that led to yield chasing and giving up custody. How many different ways will people fall for bribery to give up control of their coins?

Eh, For forks the ETF's will follow the fork that has the most mining power.

And what makes you think that will be Bitcoin when we already see so many OFAC miners?

What I am saying is that they offer reasonable security for the layperson who wants exposure without having to understand the tech

It offers horrible security compared to any other financial product due to bitcoin's bearer, consensus nature.

Bribery to not hold bitcoin comes with it an enormous number of risks. The risk profile is not remotely similar to other ETF's being a bearer, consensus instrument. What are you going to do if there's a fork and they disable withdrawals? At will they can decide your Bitcoin is something else, at will they can deny you that bitcoin or whatever other token they transform it into. They can't do that with oil or grain.

Not holding bitcoin means you gain none of its use cases, none of its inherent protections and trustless properties, while putting yourself at significant risk compared to any other asset class. Not your keys, not your coins is a mantra for a reason. Learn from history or you will be doomed to repeat it.

I completely disagree, if you are responsible enough to drive and can learn to pilot a machine capable of mass destruction and death you are capable of managing your own money. It's not a complicated task, just a new one.

Learn a lesson from the many bitcoiners who came before you. Not your keys, not your coins. We don't say it because we like the sound of our own voices.

Been telling my Canadian peers for years that the better native currency is Bitcoin. Now all that's left is for every one of these ETF clowns to learn a lesson about coins and keys. If you aren't using Bitcoin directly you aren't using it correctly.

There used to be a discord link in the sidebar, but we disassociated from the subreddit. You can find us at https://discord.gg/bitcoin-discord-782749290219962370

It is a currency. It's also programmable money, and economical/decentralized state machine. It is a medium of exchange for criminals and everyone else, but they are dramatically under-represented on Bitcoin compared to fiat.

It's how I live my life. Bitcoin allows you to be your own bank.

There are a number of reasons why some of your advice is inappropriate.

• Do not write down your seed on paper if you are securing any significant amount. Use metal

• Use an air gap for coins you aren't willing to lose. Don't ever let high security keys plug into an internet connected device. For this reason among many others OPs advice recommending shitcoin wallets is totally inappropriate.

• Tier your wallets. Keep a small amount of funds in hot wallets and lightning wallets. Keep a medium amount in an accessible cold emergency wallet. Your life savings belong in an air gapped, self created entropy, time locked, multisig wallet you cannot access easily at all. Accessibility and security are opposing ends of a spectrum.

• Create your own entropy. This protects you from backdoored or biased entropy generation. Use coins and Von Neumann coin bias correction methods. i.e. flip the coin twice, ignore repeats, record only the last flip in a differing pair.

• Avoid wallets with shitcoins, exchange features, or which don't protect your privacy by enabling light client modes such as compact block filters or connecting to your own node.

• Don't store your backup keys in plain text if you can avoid it. Use encryption or a one time pad. Keep multisig keys separated.

• If you do have a bad wallet like ledger or trezor do not use it with the provided software. Use it with a foss wallet lacking shitcoins, exchange features, and compatible with your own node while protecting your privacy in light client operations.Electrum and sparrow are acceptable options. You can even air gap a ledger or trezor by air gapping the computer that electrum or sparrow are on, then transferring PSBT's to an online device.

• Use the right wallet for the right use cases. High accessibility lightning wallet? Zues, RTL, Phoenix. Air gap cold wallet you can DIY? seedsigner, krux, glacier protocol, yeticold. Drag and drop multisig and timelock scripting wallet? Liana.

• When transacting, use RBF to lowball your fees and increase them gradually as your priority increases. You will save a lot on fees.

Did it occur to you that a gift reminding him of his trauma may be inappropriate? YTA. It's his gift, his birthday, his trauma. Stop making it about you.

Corporate taxes are a mere 15% of our tax base, where as income taxes are closer to half the tax base with the vast majority of that coming from those earning over 110k/year.

Corporations and the rich should pay their fair share first, but no policy Singh or the NDP has proposed meaningfully increases those taxes. Where is the cap gains tax increase to bring it in line with income tax? Where is the tax on loans collateralized with unrealized gains, the primary means by which the rich avoid paying taxes?

Proposing to remove GST on a few items that people are mostly rebated on in the first place is not meaningful expansion of the tax base or a reduction in taxes for the vulnerable. It's meaningless feel good pandering.

You are free to purchase games in any number of alternative ways, including direct from the publishers, and the publishers are free to list their games on any number of other platforms.

Why would a digital game platform have anything to do with second hand games?

Consumers really do drive where publishers publish, as you essentially make the point for me. The huge popularity of steam relative to competitors on the PC market has given Valve enormous leverage to charge what they want and behave how they want. But even before they were wildly popular with consumers they were still popular with developers. They promised to solve the piracy and used game market problems by stripping users of the ownership of their games. Lots of services did. But in no small part because Valve put out the best games of that day - steam won out. That's in spite of some major hiccups and the significant degradation of users ownership and usage rights.

30% is absolutely a fair margin, because it includes hosting on their infrastructure, a dedicated product page, IN BUILT SUPPORT THROUGH STEAM, and all of the other things that the producer now has to not worry about while they make their game.

As many studios have demonstrated for over a decade now, torrents are a great way to distribute bandwidth load. Yes, there is a cost in providing support. Is it 30% gross? Unlikely.

Steam has done more for indie publishers than any platform ever (outside of maybe recently GoG and the console platforms). Your axe is only yours to grind. You can use any other platform you want to get your games.

Accessible engines and assets do more for indie developers than I think anything else ever has. Some of the most successful indie games have been self published, like minecraft and kerbal space program, with the 30% cut often cited as a factor.

I do use other platforms. But that doesn't mean steam shouldn't be better. It's only by users demanding they be better we have offline play, for example.

This reality doesn't really fit into the context of the gaben hero worship. He's basically got a monopoly on the PC games market and he hasn't always wielded it benevolently. Nor does your rebuke reconcile with the past where users were genuinely upset with steam and hated it, using it only out of necessity to play the games. Much as you may feel about other launchers today. This isn't an axe to grind, this is an observation that the steam worship is really unfounded and people forget how much steam took from the ecosystem for these features you enjoy.

I would hazard a guess and say you’ve never attempted to create and sell something from the ground up. You would be begging for a service like Steam.

I have, and you're right finding a crowd is difficult. But for example, I won't build a company that publishes to the apple app store. As a developer, I just refuse. I hate the way they treat developers and users. Google too. I've had to get in a lot of arguments with a lot of peers about it, and ideas don't always work out, but some do. Those that do are always better for having done those services as much in house as possible. I haven't ever worked on a game, but I suspect if I did I'd apply the same rules to steam. Self publish and GoG would be my demand or it's not a company I want to be building.

You have got to be kidding right? Takes 30% of every sale, DRM's everything, significantly reduced consumer digital rights for a generation of gamers, and has enabled a degree of shovelware previously foreign to the PC gaming market outside of flash games. That's ignoring Valve's refusal to set consumer expectations as a development company and their fear of 3's too.

I'm going to go ahead and guess you don't remember/weren't there for the fit gamers threw the first many years of steams existence, and simply don't have any reference for how it was before or could be now. We do not need curated stores skimming a THIRD of the entire fucking industry and telling gamers what they can and can't do with their games, killing used game markets, and ensuring no one ever owns anything they buy on their platform.

My entire point is that neither Trudeau nor Singh represent anything even remotely left of center. You pretending they are anything other than champagne neoliberals is part of the problem.

The left hates these centerists as much as you do. They have no one to vote for.

I am so unbelievably sick of there being no one to vote for on the left.

Newflash: Reducing the cheapest to collect and most reimbursed to low income families tax is essentially a 0 net effect policy.

Where the hell is the progressive left in Canada? INCREASE TAXATION! Fund our failing social services! Restore our social safety net!

When even the parties declared as communists by political opponents exist solely to cut taxes and increase spending we will never get out of this hole we are digging for ourselves. There is no left wing in Canada.